4 posts tagged “food review”
Not many times in your culinary encounters do you come across something so weird, that you just start losing your mind.
Enter the ready-to-drink pumpkin soup in a can.
(The can actually says: The ugly pumpkin's sweet revolt)
I can't think of any reasonable person coming up with this idea. Which leads me to think it was drummed up by some drugged up lawyer in the marketing department.
I think it went down like this:
Scene. Conference with marketing department people.
Marketing Chief: We need ideas for a new drink. Some thing the Pepsi generation will find tasteful, cool, and by purchasing, will make them attractive to members of the opposite sex. Maybe just the last one.
Marketing dudes: How about pumpkin soup in a can? One of our subsidiaries accidentally bought a couple of metric tons instead of buying pumpkin futures.
Marketing Chief: But won't that offend common sense, lower the morale of the common man, and cause hysteria in the general population?
Marketing dudes: We can guarantee you won't be fired.
Marketing Chief: Very well then. As long as I can call it: The ugly pumpkin's sweet revolt! Full steam ahead!
Marketing dudes: Dude, go easy on the weed man.
The taste: Sweet, and pumpkin-y. It also has what I describe a sickly vegetable kind of taste, like the feeling you get if you bite into a raw celery. Bleh.
The texture: Very light, about the same consistency as cream, and it gets heavier (thicker) towards the bottom of the can. It's a kind of velvety feeling.
The temperature: These cans sit in what looks like a converted hotdog rotisserie and the are kept warm, maybe about 60 degrees celsius.
Would I do it again? Not in this lifetime.
Korea is awash with rice.
They commonly say that they don't feel like they have eaten unless they've had rice. They say something is missing from a meal without rice. In fact, the word for rice "밥" can be used in place of the word for meal "식사" and they are also interchangeable. So when it came to localising fast food for the rice happy crowd, executives had to think of something special.
It really is the kind of thing these guys would come up with in a haze of pot fueled script writing.
So I had to have one.
I went to my local Lotteria for a bite. I ordered mine without pickle because I think adding pickles is part of an international conspiracy against people with cucumber allergies.
Which resulted in...
I found more disappointment inside.
The al fresco edition (as in bought OUTSIDE the uni).
This review we review two of Korea's favourite snacks, sun-dae (pronounced like "soon" but with a short 'oo', as in 'u-mlaut', and "dae" as in the 'de' in "Descarte") and tok-bok-gi (pronounced "dock" - "borg" - ki)
You can buy these at most snack stores, and in tents set up on street corners all over the country. There isn't a bus ride where you don't see at least 5 of these.
For this review, I went to a tent set up right in front of the university entrance:
They're almost always operated by middle-aged women, and they typically sell two things, sun-dae, and tok-bok-gi.
First up, sun-dae.
You're right. This is blood and guts, literally. The stuff on the left is pig intestine stuffed with blood, ground beef, spices and rice noodles. The black colour comes from oxidised blood. Mind you, all of the ingredients in sun-dae (except maybe for the rice noodles) are found in a beef pie, so I wouldn't turn my nose up at any of this and it's not like the Europeans don't have their own version of this food - black pudding. In fact, it's almost identical say for the rice noodles.
(Personally, I don't see anything disgusting about eating cooked blood or internal organs. If we kill a cow, it'd be almost disrespectful if we didn't use or eat all of it. And going off-topic, I think anyone eating meat or wearing leather should SEE a cow being slaughtered so they'd be mindful of where their food/clothing came from, and if they don't then they shouldn't consume animals of any kind)
he stuff on the right is liver, spiced then steamed. The red stuff you see on the bottom left is salt with chilli flakes, and you can 'dip' your food in the salt to season it.
It doesn't taste like blood and it's rather filling, think of it as a sausage with a noodle filling and you're on the right track. I admit steamed liver might not be to everyone's taste, but I like the texture and the slight bitterness of the meat.
Overall, recommended, for carnivores.
Next, tok-bok-gi.
You'll find the food is kind of a start orange-red. The reason for that is simple. Chilli. Tok-bok-gi is ㅡ made with glutinous rice cakes called tok, which is then bathed in a soup of chilli paste, water, garlic and sugar, plus whatever the cook thinks is tasty.
Fishcakes are added, along with boiled eggs (sometimes) and onion.
The final result is... hot. And sticky and seafood-y, kind of like a bowl of really, REALLY chunky seafood noodles.
My rating: Gotta try if you are in Korea or are curious about Korean food.
One last food related thing before I sign off for today:
What is the taste of regret.
The taste of good chocolate in your mouth as you brush your teeth.
sniff.
daisung
No I kid you not. I'm reviewing a carbonated milk drink and eggs.
I'd love to see what this does to the google ads (I see them but you don't. Yet).
One unrelatively untested assumption about food is that a carbonated milk drink is a bad idea. Many have toyed with the idea but there's almost no way to make the stuff or buy it in a supermarket, so the debate raged on. Until now.
Introducing....
There's no discernable smell other than 'sweet'. But it's not like milk has any smell either.
It actually looks a lot like lemonade made the old fashioned way.
So, what does it taste like?
Just sweet. It's not carbonated very heavily, so it's very smooth-tasting and there's a hint of milky sweetness, like you get with those milkbottle chewies. Well, it's almost exactly like that except that it's in a liquid form and frothy.
So, can I give it a rating?
No.
My best impression of it (that I can verbalise) is that it's like one of those zen moments you have every so often. Like a moment of nothingness that grabs your attention for five seconds before you wake up and say "what's next". On to the egg then.
(I tapped the shells to make sure and gave them a bit of a shake and there was no free-moving yolk)
These were taken with gloves to my room and cracked open.
The little packed of paper you see there is a packet of salt, and and it helpfully describes why the eggs are brown.
They're not boiled so much as roasted. Fire roasted. They feel a lot more solid than a normal boiled egg and they don't have the gassy smell that a boiled egg does. Still, I like my salmonella inside someone else's stomach so I can't say that I was too excited by the prospect of eating this.
